At the Nexus of History and Art:

Kehinde Wiley’s New Installation at the VMFA

Brian Riley

Brian Riley is a United States Historian with a focus on race and religion. He currently teaches at John Tyler Community College and Virginia Union University. He holds an MA in History from Virginia Commonwealth University.

Writing on the nature of Truth in his epic Black Reconstruction in 1935, civil rights activist W.E.B. DuBois suggested “If…we are going to use history for our pleasure and amusement, for inflating our national ego, and giving us a false but pleasurable sense of accomplishment, then we must give up the idea of history as a science or as an art using the results of science, and admit frankly that we are using a version of historic fact in order to influence and educate the new generation along the way we wish.” DuBois was heavily criticizing what he called the “propaganda of history,” at a time when the United States was in its worst period of modern race relations. For fifty years the Jim Crow laws that followed the collapse of Reconstruction had fractured the United States along racial lines by way of disenfranchisement, incessant violence, economic discrimination, and segregation. As effective as these measures were to obviate the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments for the next one hundred years, to DuBois, the efforts of white supremacists to distort or conflate the events before and after the Civil War were tantamount to distorting an integral piece of our shared history as Americans, and thus leaving future generations lesser than as a result. 

DuBois was referring to in essence what is called Lost Cause, a concerted alignment of white historians and their works that were promulgated and disseminated in and beyond the South immediately after the Civil War and into the twentieth century.  The purpose of this effort, DuBois would reiterate time and time again, was to revise the history of the causes and aftermath of the Civil War so as to alleviate the defeated South of shame and guilt. No longer, according to ‘historians’ such as Edward Pollard writing in Richmond in 1866 or even Confederate President Jefferson Davis in 1881, was the cause of the war slavery, but rather the intractable efforts of the northern Republicans to injure and degrade the southern state legislatures’ autonomy and sovereignty.
Take, for instance, Mississippi’s Declaration of the Causes of Secession, which insists in 1861 that the state’s “position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery-the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth...[T]hese products have become necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery is a blow at civilization. That blow has been long aimed at the institution, and was at that point of reaching its consummation. There was no choice left but submission to the mandates of abolition, or a dissolution of the Union, whose principles had been subverted to work out our ruin.” If Lincoln’s abolitionist radicals in Congress could overrule the 5th Amendment by emancipation of their human property, vast and myriad fortunes of southern politicians and slaveholders would evaporate instantaneously.

Writing in 1866 and ruminating on the election of Lincoln, Virginian journalist Edward Pollard insisted that his ascendance “was something more that a negative evil or disappointment to the South; it was the enthronement at Washington of a sectional despotism that threatened the institutions, the property, and the lives of the people of the Southern States.” According to Pollard, the South’s hands had been tied, and forcing those states “to withdraw from a game where the stakes were so unequal, and where her loss would have been ruin.” Confederate President Jefferson Davis echoes his fellow revisionist in his 1881 Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government, in which he asserts these Radical Republicans had “created much agitation by demands for the abolition of slavery within the States by Federal intervention, and by their activist and perseverance finally became a recognized party.” Davis exclaims that their “dominant idea” was “sectional aggrandizement, looking to absolute control, and theirs is the responsibility for the war that resulted.” By severely downplaying or eliminating slavery as the central causative agent of the Civil War in their works, these ‘historians’ were treating history not as a science (which it is), but rather art, and thus leaving interpretation open to those who would receive it.

However, Lost Cause mythology did not end at desks of white historians; their artistic efforts to distort Truth went on to become inspirations for the naming of educational institutions, highways, courthouses, military bases, and in artistic installations of granite and bronze. The grandeur of these monuments of neo-confederate memorialization became fixtures in the South between 1890 and 1930, and especially in the former capitol of the Confederate States of America, Richmond, Virginia. 

  Driving down Monument Avenue, the only street certified as a National Historic Landmark in the United States, one does not see sullen and defeated Confederate soldiers and generals. One instead sees the product of this historical “propaganda” in which the CSA President Jefferson Davis stands valorously near his generals Stonewall Jackson, Robert E. Lee, and J.E.B. Stuart, depicted artistically as valiant defenders of the southern cause atop their loyal steeds. 

Not all former Confederate leaders and sympathizers agreed that Lost Cause was appropriate.  Responding to an invitation to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania in 1869 “for the purposes of marking upon the ground by enduring memorials of granite the positions and movements of the armies on the field,” former Confederate General Robert E. Lee opined that “I could not add anything material to information existing on the subject. I think it wiser, moreover, not to keep open the sores of war but to follow the examples of nations who endeavored to obliterate the marks of civil strife, to commit to oblivion the feelings engendered.” Lee had obtained his amnesty after 1865 and had been teaching at then Washington College, and was adamant towards reconciliation. If slavery was the central causative agent in the Civil War, and slavery had been abolished by the 13th Amendment, then according to Lee, there is no practical reason to memorialize Confederate efforts and individuals, as to do so would only “keep open” those “engendered sentiments” of racism that produced the war. Being an outspoken critic and adamant proponent of reconciliation as a professor at then Washington College, one can only imagine what Lee may have thought of his memorial statue commemorated in 1890 on Monument Avenue had he lived.

It is the most eastern installation and artistic affirmation of Lost Cause mythology on Monument Avenue that caught the attention of 42 year-old African American artist Kehinde Wiley. Achieving mass notoriety as gaining the esteemed commission of the presidential painting of Barack Obama, which now resides in the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery in Washington D.C., Wiley is a renowned painter for his incredible realism. Based in Brooklyn, NY, Wiley is known primarily known for his depictions of black people set against backdrops of Victorian imagery.

Speaking on his inspiration, Wiley asserts that his models assume “the poses of colonial masters, the former bosses of the Old World…I take the figure out of its original environment and place it in something completely made up.” In this way, Wiley offers an inverse synthesis of two worlds that rarely met in real life in his Rumors of War, based off the statue of Confederate general J.E.B. Stuart.  

Permanently Installed in December 2019 to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond, Wiley’s take on Stuart’s monument will be a 1:1 size statue of a black man with dreadlocks and wearing jeans and a hoodie astride another noble steed. Having just been debuted in New York City’s Times Square in late September, this new and permanent installation on the grounds of the VMFA has already attracted much attention for its boldness in execution (it should be noted that the Stuart’s statue will remain only about a mile and half from Wiley’s for comparison).  In a city replete with Lost Cause mythology still seen and felt in the twenty-first century, Wiley’s statue will achieve for viewers a thought-provoking juxtaposition, a veritable nexus of history and art.

 Wiley is thus following in the footsteps of other black artists such as Robert Colescott, who achieved similar recognition for his controversial revisions of classic American paintings. In his 1975 George Washington Carver Crossing the Delaware; Page from an American History Textbook, Colescott revises Emanuel Leutze’s 1851 Washington Crossing the Delaware to show not the first President of the United States, but rather the influential agricultural scientist and graduate of the Tuskegee Institute at the helm and surrounded by racist stereotypes of black figures. In this revisionist and satirical effort, Colescott brings attention to negative depictions of black Americans, inverting a classic nationalistic depiction of history.     

           Whether this same sentiment is used to create Wiley’s Rumors of War is negligible, but the effect will likely be the same; a nexus of art and history that seeks to upend preconceptions of race relations in this country. That Wiley is satirizing openly the conventions of ‘lost cause’ mythology so openly will no doubt garnish controversy, but as with Colescott and the American Revolution, not entirely a negative one. Rather, Wiley will be bringing into focus through his art the undeniable impact that nationalistic depictions (after all, the Confederacy attempted to reserve itself as a nation founded on white supremacy) have on the popular interpretation of history.  In doing so, Wiley’s new installation at the VMFA will not be another piece of DuBois’ historical “propaganda,” but instead expose the inspiration for his Rumors of War as such.